Two UK ISPs (Internet Service Providers) has lost an appeal against the Digital Economy Act (DEA) which was initially rushed in by the last Labour government, but sadly moved forward by the current coalition of Conservative/Liberal Democrat.

“BT and Talk Talk have lost an appeal over controversial measures to tackle copyright infringement online.

The internet service providers (ISPs) had argued the UK’s Digital Economy Act was incompatible with EU law.

The Act will mean ISPs will have to send warning letters to alleged illegal file downloaders, as well as potentially cutting users off.”

Personally I feel that this act may harm innocent PC and Internet users as we have seen in the past when a few media companies employed law firms to send those suspected of file sharing copyrighted files via peer to peer (P2P), a letter accusing them of sharing said files and if they did not pay a fine, would face the courts.

In many cases these where completely wrong accusation’s, which has me and others worried that not only is the freedoms on the internet being eroded but more serious is the anguish that could be felt by those who are innocent being accused in the first place.

I do not condone copyright theft at all, however I do feel the onus is on the media company to prove and to stop the website or P2P service from operating, over putting the ball in the ISPs court as this will only cause more work and time used for the ISP to check if a user is sharing copyrighted files, which will in the end increase costs which will be passed onto the end user.

So for the vast majority of internet end users this will have them paying more for their internet when they have not been at fault. I guess this is going to be an interesting on-going topic, I would like to hear others thoughts on this.